R3 Rebuts Claims Blockchain Research Was Money Wasted

In a letter to Cointelegraph, R3 CEV has refuted claims it researched then abandoned Blockchain technology, saying its platform was “never designed” to use it.

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The managing director of “Blockchain-inspired” startup R3 CEV has hit back at criticism it spent millions of dollars on research into Blockchain technology it would never use.

In a recent presentation on its Corda platform uploaded to Twitter last week, R3 stated it would not be creating a Blockchain “because it didn’t need one.”

The update attracted widespread ridicule from cryptocurrency circles, with commentators accusing the startup of wasting its own money.

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In comments emailed to Cointelegraph, R3 Managing Director Charley Cooper sought to reiterate that the startup had never intended to use Blockchain technology directly.

“Too bad the story isn’t a story,” he wrote, further adding:

“We’ve said from the beginning that while Corda is a distributed ledger platform, it is not a traditional Blockchain platform and was never designed to be one.”

His comments run similar to those of Associate Director Clemens Wan, who said at a conference that R3 was not a Blockchain startup but merely “Blockchain-inspired.”

Cooper continued:

“[Blockchains] cannot be applied unthinkingly to wholesale financial markets: changes must be made to satisfy regulatory, privacy and scalability concerns. [...] Corda’s distributed ledger technology was designed from the ground up to address the specific needs of the financial services industry.”

“It is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of Blockchain systems, but with design choices that make it able to meet the needs of regulated financial institutions.”